Blue Note: Uncompromising Expression: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939

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Blue Note is unquestionably the most iconic jazz label there’s ever been. But when Alfred Lion started the label in 1939 with a recording of boogie-woogie pianists Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons, his intention was simple: To release music that he felt was important. It is a mission that he never wavered from, nor have the Blue Note albums that have followed in his illustrious footsteps. This list of 50 albums is a mere fraction of the LPs that Blue Note has put over the years. Let us know in the comments, below, which ones you think we may have missed. 50. Don Cherry – Complete Communion The brief, melancholic title waltz opens The Blue Notebooks, with a performance from Swinton, and Kafka’s scene-setting line: “Everyone carries a room about inside them.” The longer, Purcell and Beethoven-influenced, cello-led “On The Nature Of Daylight” then follows. It is an immensely popular lament, which has done more than any other Richter piece to cement his name into the international music world’s consciousness. It’s a fine example of Richter’s capability to create eminently adaptable art and then allow it, like a growing child, to exist in the world on its own, to be added to and promoted in a multitude of ways. a b Pytlik, Mark (1 July 2004). "Max Richter: The Blue Notebooks". Pitchfork . Retrieved 21 November 2017.

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Richter, Max (8 July 2016). "Millions of us knew the Iraq war would be a catastrophe. Why didn't Tony Blair?". The Guardian . Retrieved 8 July 2016. Tapley, Kristopher (December 13, 2016). "Oscars: Academy Disqualifies Arrival, Silence, Manchester Original Scores". Variety . Retrieved February 26, 2017.British album certifications – Max Richter – The Blue Notebooks". British Phonographic Industry . Retrieved 13 June 2023. Despite Lion’s admiration for “American vitalism”, jazzmen like Morgan proved to be rather too freely expressive and uncompromising for their own good. Shaw called music the brandy of the damned, and it’s all the more addictive if combined with heroin and cocaine. Blue is the colour of lush, sensual midnight, and also of a bleary, bruised, hungover dawn. Yet as Havers explains, that American idiom – used, like abstract expressionist painting, as propaganda for go-getting Yankee liberties during the cold war – owed its preservation on records to a Berliner. Blue Note was founded in 1939 by Alfred Lion, the son of a Jewish architect who settled in New York in 1933 after fleeing from the capital of the Third Reich. Lion slept rough at first in Central Park, and when he could afford to rent a room immediately installed a Victrola gramophone to play the jazz records he bought on excursions uptown to Harlem.

The Blue Notebooks - Wikipedia

A blue note is a flattened or – in the terminology of jazz – a “worried” note, which dips below the major scale to vouch for the intensity of an emotion; Blue Note is a record label which, since its foundation 75 years ago, has recorded the bluest and most worried jazz performers. Shaded by nocturnal melancholy, blue is the preferred tonality of their music. A classic album by Miles Davis was called Kind of Blue, and Blue Note later recorded the guitarist Kenny Burrell’s Midnight Blue, attuned to the mood of a moonlit sky seen through the glare of urban streetlights. Garratt, John (12 May 2015). "Max Richter: The Blue Notebooks". PopMatters . Retrieved 5 July 2019. Richard Havers’s book about Blue Note records, with its details of the inspirations and excesses of the label’s major talents, amounts to a history of jazz itself As with his most esteemed classical forebears, Richter’s The Blue Notebooks takes extant ideas and presents them anew for different times. And as with those forebears, his work is continuing to gain recognition as the years pass and the album’s place in our musical history is continuing to grow.Schepper, Ron (10 March 2004). "Max Richter – The Blue Notebook – Review". Stylus Magazine. Archived from the original on 1 September 2006 . Retrieved 19 December 2018.